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Bonnie Bassler, the Director of Graduate Studies and Professor for Princeton University, talks about the language and social behavior of bacteria. Through her research, she has discovered ways of speaking to bacteria chemically to alter their behavior. Traditional anti-biotics work by killing bacteria. With Bonnie's discovery, it is now possible to work with these bacteria to make them do things they wouldn't normally do.

I find the strangest things sometimes. Apparently National Geographic did a special a while back on the world's first head transplant. It was performed on a monkey. Doing some research you'll find there have been other such experiments with other animals. Something about this that reminds me of Shakespeare's Hamlet...

The six experiments at the LHC are all run by international collaborations, bringing together scientists from institutes all over the world. Each experiment is distinct, characterised by its unique particle detector.

The two large experiments, ATLAS and CMS, are based on general-purpose detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator. They are designed to investigate the largest range of physics possible. Having two independently designed detectors is vital for cross-confirmation of any new discoveries made.

Two medium-size experiments, ALICE and LHCb, have specialised detectors for analysing the LHC collisions in relation to specific phenomena.

Two experiments, TOTEM and LHCf, are much smaller in size. They are designed to focus on ‘forward particles’ (protons or heavy ions). These are particles that just brush past each other as the beams collide, rather than meeting head-on

The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb detectors are installed in four huge underground caverns located around the ring of the LHC. The detectors used by the TOTEM experiment are positioned near the CMS detector, whereas those used by LHCf are near the ATLAS detector.

I recently came across a blog post by Simon Quellen Field, whom found a wonderful gem of news, nearly a year ago, regarding research done at Wake Forest University School of Medicine that has discovered a unique breed of mice that contain "anti-cancers". Technically speaking, the mice's white blood cells enable their immune system to fight off cancer.

The study found that the mutation is inherited in subsequent generations, leading to a notion that the mutation may be caused by a single dominant gene.

"That gives us hope that there's one simple switch that you can throw somewhere in the signaling pathway to turn on this tumor-fighting behavior," researcher Mark Willingham says.

If this were to be true, then a drug could easily be formulated to trigger this tumor-fighting switch.

Maybe it's just me, but this sounds a lot like the start to a real version of the X-Men movie. That said, I'll wait for the expedited-cell-rejuvenating mutation followed by a nice Adamantium dip.

Summary

A smart environment is, by definition, context-aware: by combining inputs from multiple pervasive sensing devices, applications in the smart infrastructure should be able to intelligently deduce the intent or attributes of an individual without explicit manual input. Location is perhaps one of the earliest, and still most common, examples of such context. There are myriad examples of pervasive applications where the system uses the location of a mobile individual, or sometimes groups of individuals, to customize or adapt to the computing environment. A smart environment must be able to both determine and predict the location of an individual. In this chapter, we shall look at the various protocols, algorithms and technologies used for effective location prediction in smart environments. We shall first study the various research prototypes and techniques used to obtain the location information of a mobile user or device in a smart environment. We will then develop a unifying approach toward location prediction and finally concentrate on the problem of location prediction for both the geometric and symbolic group of location reporting technologies.